The antidote to ideologies

The cool yet warming climate of the increasingly fracked-up blogosphere

Controversy continues to rage throughout the unscientific community about whether the blogosphere is under severe danger of hot stones being thrown from glass houses, global freezing-out by everyone from Rupert Murdoch and Theresa May to Mario Draghi and Angela Merkel, or an intra-terrestrial attack on David Icke from sane people dressed as lizards.

Because everyone is absolutely right about everything relating to this dispute all the time, data collection remains problematic. But so far it seems pretty clear that Mario Draghi is a lounge lizard pouring cold water on truth wherever he finds it, Wolfgang Schäuble’s hot gossip has resulted in his own personal ozone layer hole, and the biggest single contributor to blogosphere freezing is Rupert Murdoch’s heart…plus of course the cold feet so often exhibited by politicians who decide to take him on.

The changing pattern of the Wolf Stream is of particular concern, given its propensity to cry a great deal during predictions of armageddon and apocalypse, or negotiations between the Chancellery and the Acropolis.

But equally disturbing is the now empirically proven rise in bollocks levels across the blogosphere. It is especially apparent in the Western Atlantic landfall area, where even once-trusted practitioners such as Reuter Bloomberg and Hero Sledge are flooding the land masses with wild theories about the imminent submersion of Greece as the new Atlantis. And off the continental shelf of Europe, bollocks levels are expected to be sufficiently high by 2016 to provide a permanent waterway between the sinking UK capital of Johnsongapore, and the Babel towers of Bankfart.

Things have become so serious, the lightweight floating island of Torynaffia in the tax-free English Channel has been established in order to syphon excess bollocks onto the United Kingdom. Founders Avid and Frauderick Sarklay say that, while they are generally satisfied with their success in spraying Tsunamis of bollocks harmlessly over the British population, “we must step up our efforts in order to crack down on rising levels of naked awareness – and thus not alarm sleeping Britons. They must Remain Asleep and Carry On”.

At the time of writing, one of the few exceptions to bollocks inundation is controversial Jihadist Iswotitisic State blogger Francis Coppolapoulus. However, being a lone singing lady who isn’t fat, she appears to be outnumbered by bollocks-deniers insisting that the Blogotanic is unsinkable.

Meanwhile, spin pollution continues to be an ecological worry for the blogosphere. “It’s a frackin’ plot by the frackin’ Illuminated Zionistical Elderly Boss Class,” suggested eminent blogger Karl-Kirk Topmarx, “an’ anyone ‘oo cannot see the fundamentally mental nature of frackin’ bourgeois laughing-cow coerced libertarian oppression involved ‘ere should be sent to a frackin’ political correction centre”.

Others are less certain about this, albeit only marginally less intolerant. One-time regular blogger and lifetime EU/Tory hater Conservative MEP Dan Hannan says we should “Get fracking”. He doesn’t mean we should bludgeon it to death, but rather that our objective should be to have a 100% fracked blogosphere by 2020…the year in which, as we know, some 14,570 political promises are due to come to fruition.

For myself, I struggle to keep my laptosphere defracked. It is part of my vain (and I am exceedingly vain) attempt to ensure that personal bp levels remain in the temperate climate zone.

My greek neighbour knocked on the door this morning.
Would I like to lend him £32,000 over 12 months with his mercedes car as colateral?
I answered thank you my friend, but I am not looking to buy a mercedes car today, or for that matter any day.

I am a very infrequent listener these days to BBC R4’s Today programme, I find it interferes with my ability to digest All-Bran and can cause nausea for an entire morning. However, due to an early morning car journey, I just caught some well crafty crafted words on the Greek paydayornot situation which were woefully shallow and skewed, in truth skewered. There immediately followed an item on an ‘unpleasant’ video currently being aired on a notorious social media site which apparently shows a baby being maltreated by repeatedly being immersed in water in various positions. The ironic juxtaposition of these two items appealed to my sense of the bizarre and I wondered for a few moments if there was some intention to create an analogy by stealth going on here. Those moments of wonder were, sadly, all too brief.

Paul – not quite – the report was a tad more nuanced than that. MotherJones has a good summary:

“The Environmental Protection Agency today released a long-awaited draft report on the impact of fracking on drinking water supplies. The analysis, which drew on peer-reviewed studies as well as state and federal databases, found that activities associated with fracking do “have the potential to impact drinking water resources.” But it concluded that in the United States, these impacts have been few and far between.

The report identifies several possible areas of concern, including: “water withdrawals in times of, or in areas with, low water availability; spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water; fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources; below ground migration of liquids and gases; and inadequate treatment and discharge of water.”

However, the report says, “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.”
[end snip]

After all, the people doing the study will all be living in areas well away from where fracking is done, and being paid to study it for corporations who have enough money to dig out the facts to suit their needs.

However, the report says, “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.”

Well, you’d have to be unlucky, in this case, to find something you weren’t looking for in the first place. Anyway, they would hardly have to be widespread or systemic to be a tracking nuisance. Just one incident could potentially cause a few mortals (we’ll leave aside flora and fauna for the sake of brevity) to forsake this mortal coil. Crikey, you don’t think…

@Paul. Yes, it’s not as though the E.P.A. has been subject to regulatory capture by the resource corporations or anything. I’m sure we can trust everything they say. After all, they do have the words “Environmental Protection” in their title :)

Paul & Rowan
There is no threat to water supplies in the US as far as I know, and I’ve never said there is.
But there is a clear and present danger to our already overloaded and underinvested water supply in the UK.
I do wish people would read what I write, and stop trying to tell me what I think.

Regards fracking, it’s conventional drilling as it goes down through the water table (which we use), this is drilling which is steel & concrete sheathed, technology well perfected, over many years. The drilling goes many thousands of feet below the water table, then goes horizontal into the gas/oil bearing shale. Fracking per se is not a problem, if done correctly, under competent supervision.

Then it gets political: Russia is deeply invested in the anti-fracking lobby: their whole economy is dependent on good energy export prices, hence the recent US/Saudi attacks on the oil price. The whole NWO/FAUXECO loons, with the EPA front & centre are conducting a war on energy, in their attempts to drag us into a post-industrial feudal future. Go figure.

Then it gets economic: most fracking wells are not good long term investments, until the technology is much improved.

JD – you forgot a bit…
After drilling horizontally into the shale, thousands of gallons of water mixed with toxic chemicals are pumped into the formation under extremely high pressure to fracture the shale and release the oil / gas. This toxic brew mostly returns to the surface, then has to be disposed of somewhere.
Tight shale has to be drilled and fracked multiple times to extract the oil / gas. Each well only produces for a handful of years before production declines to near zero and the well is capped and abandoned.

JD – there is not a “war on energy” – there is just the growing realisation (by some at least) that in terms of fossil fuel we are scraping the bottom of the barrel at the same time as the costs of pollution are starting to bite. There are no such things as infinite resources on a finite sized planet.
Ah, but you think technology will save us. Don’t you see that it’s unrestrained use of technology that got us into this mess in the first place? That oh so human habit of praising all the benefits and ignoring or denying the costs.

You’re a liar, Rowan. & a dumb one. If there was any chance of toxic chemicals being used the EPA would ban them like a shot. Ditto if there were any chance of them percolating to the surface. I challenge you to produce a single respectable peer reviewed paper or even a decent article to back up these ludicrous claims. You are a Goebbles: tell lies, tell biguns, repeat em often.

Water supply is the nearest thing to a perpetual motion machine this planet possesses: water evaporates from the oceans at the equator & rains down at higher latitudes, & 75% of the Earth’s surface is water. Water shortages are another figment of alarmists imaginations, another control mechanism. A La H. L. Mencken: keep the populace scared.
Here’s the political bit you forgot:

“In terms of fossil fuel we are sraping the bottom of the barrel”
Another simply preposterous & baseless claim.
I’ve been reading this tosh since I was 19, in 1972, when I read “A Blueprint for Survival”.
Published by the Ecologist Magazine, endorsed by the Club of Rome, a eugenicist think tank promoting the NWO Globalist One World Govt agenda. about 34 worthies also endorsed this little doom & gloom booklet, most of whom had 2, 3 or 4 bunches of initials after their names.
Population was to be severely contained, in fact some depopulation measures were necessary, & oil would run out by 2000.
The World now supports a population almost double, oil is still so plentiful that geopolitical games can be played with its supply, oil wells are refilling, proving oil’s abiotic as well as fossil fuel origins, & fools & liars are still spreading doom & gloom.
Have a nice day.
Hell, 2015 – 1972 = 43 years twats have been crying imminent doom & demanding swift & draconian anti human remedies.
Hey, that makes me 61 !!! :)

In the first article, where Goddard compares two graphs, he doesn’t scale the y-axes to match. In his overlay, he is comparing mm to cm and completely failing to recognise that mm are 10 times smaller than cm.

In the second article, he appears to be claiming that because Greenland has gained snow since September (y’know, during WINTER) that there isn’t a problem. The graph he includes even shows that recent melting seasons have been severely below the average, but he doesn’t even mention that.

JD, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Your sources are unreliable. Bad science, cherry picked data, misleading graphs – all intended to convince you that energy companies can continue to produce fossil fuel with no consequences. Deny the evidence as much as you like – the earth is warming, the ice is melting and the climate is changing.

Oh, the Spiller article was in response to your “severe weather” and the real causes thereof.

The EPA report does not say what Paul and Gemma seem assume it says. Apologies for the long snips (from resilience.org)

The Environmental Protection Agency has released its long awaited draft assessment of the impacts that fracking has on the nation’s drinking water supplies — confirming that the process does indeed contaminate water.
“From our assessment, we conclude there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources,” the EPA wrote.

The impacts take a variety of forms, the EPA wrote, listing the effects of water consumption especially in arid regions or during droughts, chemical and wastewater spills, “fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources,” the movement of liquids and gasses below ground “and inadequate treatment and discharge of wastewater.”

The agency wrote that it had documented “specific instances” where each of those problems had in fact happened and some cases where multiple problems combined to pollute water supplies.

“The EPA found disturbing evidence of fracking polluting our water despite not looking very hard,” Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement. “This study was hobbled by the oil and gas industry’s refusal to provide key data.”

Thomas Burke, deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s office of research and development, downplayed the degree of risk, focusing on the percentage of wells where water was proved to have been contaminated. “In fact, the number of documented impacts to drinking water is relatively low when compared to the number of fractured wells,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

But while the percentages are small, the raw numbers are quite large.

“Between 2000 and 2013, approximately 9.4 million people lived within one mile of a hydraulically fractured well,” the EPA’s study concluded, adding that nearly 7,000 municipal or public water supplies are also close to fracked wells. “These drinking water sources served more than 8.6 million people year-round in 2013,” the agency added.

With that many people living nearby, even a small percentage rate can translate into large impacts.

Study Scaled Down Repeatedly: EPA Whistleblower
Weston Wilson, who worked for the agency for over 37 years, and who sought whistle-blower protections status after reporting a string of conflicts of interest and major flaws in the EPA’s last major investigation into fracking in 2004, described to DeSmog how the EPA’s current study had been narrowed repeatedly. The study left out key parts of the full process involved in extracting oil and gas from fracked wells, like wastewater pit failures and engineering practices, he noted. And many locations EPA hoped to study early on were dropped along the way.

“Today’s announcement will be spun by industry lobbyists as a clean bill of health for oil and gas developers around the country,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Arizona), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement according to The Hill. “Nothing could be further from the truth, as EPA’s own findings have shown. Irresponsible oil and gas development puts water quality at risk for millions of Americans, and no amount of spin can change that.”

Not trying to put words in your mouth, John, just trying to correct Paul’s misinformation re the study. He was trying to rain on your parade. That’s MY job damnit ;-)

Rowan, the Steve Goddard graphs are not comparing MM to CM, they are comparing sea level claims at different times .by the same govt agency: Nasa. If you’re not bright enough to realise that, you’re dumber than I thought, or a bolder liar. Goddard (Tony Heller) has 2 degrees & is perfectly capable of comparing graphs.

Water supplies in the US are also being drained. The corn belt and California. That is a majority of agricultural production for food in the US. They are also fracking the current supplies of water by contamination, as well as using the water to assist fracking for gas and oil. The water loss is measurable, and the measurements are being concealed.
People understand that weather changes, but they do not understand when climate changes.

CLEAN POTABLE water is the issue. Can you drink sea water? No. Can you drink oily water? No. Can you drink water contaminated with toxic algae? No. To imply there is no water problem because “75% of the surface is water” is a straw man argument, a rhetorical technique that has no place in a scientific discussion.

Times were you could stick a pipe in the ground and the oil and gas would come rushing out. You got 100 times the amount of energy back. Nowadays, it takes massive effort to drill and crack for tiny amounts of oil and gas. Discovery of new fields has lagged production of existing fields for decades. What else would you call the monumental efforts involved in fracking / deep sea drilling / arctic drilling OTHER than scraping the bottom of the barrel?

You claim that for 43 years twats have been crying imminent doom.
I think that for 43+ years twats like yourself have denied (and are still denying) the reality in front of you, and have prevented any effective action from being taken. It takes decades to transform an energy system. Decades we no longer have thanks to idiotic Deniers like you.

jd: Remember,you cannot reason a person out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.
Or to put it another way. ‘Never argue with an idiot, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience’

Rowan is clearly a ‘true believer’ and will willingly walk into a german ‘shower room’ and expect to get washed.

Oh, no, you couldn’t, you just HAD to make a completely inappropriate comment. Nice. If that’s the best you can do to dispute the evidence I commented about here, showing that a warming climate is a serious issue for humanity, then stay out of the adult disscussion and go back to the playground where you belong.

By the way, any Deniers out there, if you want to complain about being called names then look to your own behaviour. On this site, rather than talk about the scientific evidence I write about you often prefer to call me names, make assumptions about my lifestyle, make degrading and insulting comments like Just me… just did and generally do anything to avoid doing your own research. You can lead a horse to water…..

I am not a “true believer”, I am merely convinced by the overwhelming evidence thus accumulated over the past 100+ years that shows that CO2 traps warmth in the lower atmosphere, that CO2 levels are increasing roughly as expected as humans burn billions of tons of fossil fuel and that lower atmosphere temperatures are rising roughly as expected.http://Www.skepticalscience.com